Month: May 2005

To celebrate 12 years of wedded bliss (*snort*) yesterday, we all went bowling. And because it was a special occasion, we didn’t go to our typical candlepin bowling alley (for the rest of the country – those are the little balls, three per-frame), no indeed, we went to Gardner Ten Pin.

And as I flung my big pink ball down the lane, I couldn’t help but wonder: is there anything more annoying than hanging your thumbnail ripped off because the thumb hole on your bowling ball isn’t the right size?

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Junior whooped our butts. Sure, he had bumpers, but his score on the 2nd string was 133. I was the only other person to break 100, with 115. First string my total was only 85. 133! Mommy’s little bowler!

7:30 on a Sunday night…isn’t that just the worst time of day of the whole week? Enough time for you to think “What can I squeeze in before I have to go to bed” and not enough time to actually do something. And so it goes, another weekend spirals down the drain. Wheeeeeeee!

Yesterday was a good day…the step kids were up and thank God for that. My step-daughter helped me run my game booth at the lawn party, and I can’t even fathom what I would have done without her help. It really was a 2-person game. I’m going to mention that to them for next year’s planning. And then noon rolled around and nobody showed up to relieve us. At 12:15 they finally just shut down our game (I have no idea for how long) because I really couldn’t stay there any longer. I was starving and had to go to the bathroom. Not necessarily in that order.

Then after we all kind of passed out for a while, we all went to eat at the Japanese steakhouse part of Chopsticks. It was a sacrifice on the parts of Junior and his brother cause they don’t like that food so much. Except actually, Junior did eat some of the chicken, which pleased me, and a few bites of rice. I looked at the $11.00 for his meal as being better than paying a babysitter. Plus they all had a blast – what’s not to love about food being prepared in front of you? This was actually where I wanted to go for dinner to celebrate our anniversary, and because it was a kid weekend, we really had to go somewhere with everyone. I’m so glad they were willing to go. It was a great meal.

After that, we headed over to Tri-Town Drive-In to see Kicking and Screaming. It was pretty good; there were some genuinely funny parts, but it wasn’t as drop-dead funny that I thought it could be. I’d see it again, but hey, by going to the drive-in to see it at $15 a carload with 5 people is not shabby. If you go, just remember the bug spray. It’s nasty outside at night without it.

I’m off to work a game book at the elementry school’s lawn party today. The weather is questionable…I’m hoping that I’ll be inside somewhere because spending the next two hours standing outside in the dank air doesn’t thrill me.

But it’s only two hours, and Mr. Crunchy’s wife (Mrs. Crunchy?) is doing the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer this weekend. I know some of you sponsored my sister when she did this walk last year – thanks again for that. So if you hadn’t already sponsored someone and were looking to, why not visit her pledge page and throw a few bucks her way? Every dollar helps, and whether you are a billionaire (I’m sure I’ve got a lot of billionaires reading my site every day. That’s what gets me through my morning, really. That and tea. And pastry. But mostly the thought that billionaires are fans of mine), or like me, aren’t quite in that tax bracket.

In other news…Junior spent all day yesterday throwing up. He was up at 5am on the potty with a “bad belly” but we thought he got rid of it. The school called at 10am to tell me he’d, you know, in his classroom. I got him and he spent from 10:30 or so to 9pm randomly napping and throwing up. That was fun. And this morning, we were awakened by the sound of the electric substation down the street blowing up. BOOOOOM. At quarter of six. So Junior runs in to tell us his belly feels better. At quarter of six. And step-son runs in to tell us the electricity is out. At quarter of six.

Did I mention I’ve been up since quarter of six?

Nobody from Hollywood has called regarding my show idea from yesterday. I wonder what the problem is?

I thought I’d illustrate for you how my brain jumped from topic A to topic Z. I know this happens to other people, but I’m not here to talk about other people, am I?

Okay, so in the car this morning, WXLO interviewed a comedian who I guess had some connection to the show “This Old House” that ended badly. Or something.

1. This Old House. On Patriot’s Day, we took the long way back to my sister’s house from Lexington and passed the This Old House house in Carlysle. There are big “no parking” signs all over the place.
2. They are selling tickets to tour the This Old House house on Ticketmaster. It’s $12 for an adult. I have no idea what they are showing you that is worth twelve bucks. If Norm wasn’t there I’d demand my money back. I should go to tell them we used the B-Dry company to waterproof our basement.
3. I’m sure they’d care who we used for waterproofing.
4. Do they always sell tickets, or is this something the owner is doing? Is this how they can afford to pay for custom molding?
5. I haven’t watched This Old House in a long time. We used to watch it. There were a couple of houses that we actually watched beginning to end. One house was in Sudbury. One was in Acton – I think it was yellow. And a Cambridge house with almost no yard. I remember when they left New England and did west-coast houses. They also went to Hawaii.
6. The Hawaii show was cool. I remember that I didn’t like the homeowner. I wonder if you can hire someone to pretend to be you, on the off chance you are normally obnoxious. The camera adds 10 pounds and doubles obnoxiousness.
7. They took a field trip to visit a mansion in Hawaii. The television came up out of the floor. That was cool. I think we should do that.
8. I remember they had a kind of “culture shock” when faced with the building difficulties in Hawaii. You have to ship materials in and construction debris out. Very expensive. And there was the whole “look, no insulation” factor – it was really odd, coming from New England, to see that as long as the wall is nailed up, it meets code. I think part of the house had barely more than a plywood exterior wall – because that’s all it needed.
9. Our shed is like that. It would be like living in our shed. That would be cool to order a shed from Home Depot and taa-daa, your new house is here. Where would you like us to put it?
10. I wonder if you could live in a shed. Not in the winter, obviously.
    Our shed is probably the size of Henry Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. [ed: I looked it up, it was 10×15, so larger than the shed] How much stuff could I fit in our shed? I don’t think a bed would even fit.
11. Maybe a television producer should make a reality show with someone live in a shed in the middle of the woods.
12. Thoreau wasn’t completely alone, and did odd jobs to earn money, so I don’t know how they’d handle that. They’d have to make the contestant walk 2 miles to a fake “town” to find odd jobs. So you could buy meat that you’d have to cook over an open fire because there is no room for a stove in your shed.
13. Odd jobs. Not odd but random. Although maybe now, those same jobs would be odd odd jobs.

At this point I arrived at work. So if any tv producers want to use my shed-in-the-woods idea, you can send the check to this address.